One never knows where a family heirloom will lead. Brooklyn’s Renaissancebegan with a cultural artifact that Italian Renaissance scholar Melissa Meriam Bullard’s mother inherited from a distant cousin: a portrait of Luther Boynton Wyman (1804-79), a forgotten shipping merchant for Liverpool’s Black Ball Line, long-time resident of Brooklyn Heights, and “guiding hand” in the founding of the “arts-friendly community” along Montague Street during the 1850s and 1860s (with the Academy of Music, now “BAM,” as Brooklyn’s cultural center).​​Bullard argues that Wyman and other members of Brooklyn’s business elite, inspired by William Roscoe, the "Lorenzo de' Medici of Liverpool," exemplify the ways in which “Atlantic commercial networks [facilitated] collaborative patronage of culture, and civic pride [that] flowed together around the arts.” She suggests that noblesse oblige as much as competition with Manhattan motivated Brooklyn’s “haut-bourgeois families” to employ their private wealth to sustain the arts as Brooklyn emerged as the third-largest independent city in the United States. Rather than proposing the creation of public institutions, Brooklyn’s elite employed the Medici merchant patronage model to found the city’s first reading rooms and musical, artistic, and horticultural societies to “serve as uplifting examples to their grubby and untutored urban neighbors.” Unfortunately, the Civil War disrupted Brooklyn’s Renaissance; and early success could not withstand the changes and divisions that the Gilded Age engendered. As a result, Brooklyn’s rapid but short-lived cultural renaissance remained lost to history — until Bullard followed Luther Wyman’s trail from rural Massachusetts to Brooklyn.

Ronald Reagan campaign-stops in August 1980. Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson would visit in 1984, and President Clinton in 1997.

By Noël K. Wolfe

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Bronx was a national symbol of urban decay, used as a political backdrop to send messages of despair, governmental failure, the decline of urban spaces and other racialized messages of fear.[1] Drug addiction and drug selling became a national, state, and local political battleground that reflected differing political ideologies. Even at the community level, a tension existed within New York City neighborhoods about how best to respond to drug crises. In 1969, New York Black Panther Party member Michael “Cetewayo” Tabor warned Harlemites about the long-term implications of inviting police, who he described as “alien hostile troops,” into their community to address heroin addiction and drug-related crime. While Tabor did not deny that those addicted to heroin were committing “most of their robberies, burglaries and thefts in the Black community against Black people,” he challenged community members to be suspicious of the motives behind “placing more pigs in the ghetto.”[2] Tabor sought a community-driven solution to heroin addiction — one that did not include the police. Similarly in the Bronx, members of the Young Lords Party responded to heroin addiction by occupying the administrative offices of Lincoln Hospital in November 1970 and successfully demanding a drug treatment program for community members. The Lincoln Hospital Detox Program, a “community-worker controlled program,” paired political education with therapeutic support to assist those seeking help to overcome addiction.[3]

Today, just a few days before Christmas, we hear from journalist and writer Alex Palmer about how an early twentieth century New Yorker (his great grand-uncle) invented the popular, contemporary American fixtures of the Christian holiday. Gotham 's interview with the bestselling author of The Santa Claus Man follows.

By Margaret A. BruciaThe nearly 300 letters were a jumbled heap— out of their envelopes, out of order, out of my field of expertise. But the moment I bargained for them that spring morning in the confusion of a Roman flea market, the academic focus of my life underwent a seismic shift, from the ancient Mediterranean world to New York City in the Gilded Age. Julia Gardiner Gayley’s letters, it turned out, were more than just interesting primary source material from the first three decades of the twentieth century, they were a passageway into the intimate lives of two strong, confident, articulate, independent-minded women. And they told a story worthy of Henry James or Edith Wharton, from the beginning of Mary’s Grand Tour of Italy in 1902 to her mother’s death in New York in 1937.

Four months after I found the letters, I found Julie’s great-granddaughter, Vittoria McIlhenny, in Maine. Pleased that I had rescued the correspondence from oblivion, Vittoria graciously and patiently answered my questions and shared photographs of her family. She gave me a copy of her grandmother Mary’s memoir, written when Mary was in her sixties. And then, four years later, while Vittoria and her brother Sandro were moving an old desk from an attic, they discovered something in the drawers — the other half of my correspondence, bundles of Mary’s letters to her mother. This wealth of information became my primary source for the series we have just concluded, Julie & Mary: The Private Letters of the Gayley Women. The first seven posts focused on a few of the many famous people Julia Gardiner Gayley interacted with in New York (actors, musicians, painters, scientists, businessmen, religious leaders, philanthropists, social activists, authors, philosophers, architects and politicians). Rita Lydig, Sarah Bernhardt, Alessandro Fabbri, Archer Huntington, Daisy Chanler, Albert Einstein, Ralph Adams Cram and Woodrow Wilson emerged as my stars. Now, in this final post, it’s Julie and Mary’s time to shine.

Jan Lukas. Broadway & Times Square, 1967. Museum of the City of New York.

By Morgen Stevens-GarmonThere is a statue in Times Square that stands on the north side of 46th Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue; not the Father Duffy sculpture for which the intersection is named, but a slightly smaller work found to the south of the formidable World War I priest. This statue depicts the great American song and dance man George M. Cohan. Measuring a solid three feet taller than its subject did in life, the statue celebrates a man who composed, directed, produced, or starred in over 100 Broadway productions, making him the most prolific musical theater artist in history.

By Margaret A. BruciaJulia Gardiner Gayley, fifty-five years old and divorced since 1910, married a second time on Thursday, August 26, 1920. Her unlikely husband, Gano Sillick Dunn, was 49. Julie met Gano (pronounced guh-NO) through her daughters. An older but eligible bachelor, he was part of their broader social circle and, through the years, called on each of them at home — first Mary, next Agnes, then Folly. A regular fixture at Washington Square, Gano in time realized that he was more interested in their dynamic mother than in any of the beautiful Gayley daughters, and he began escorting Julie to social events and intellectual gatherings.

This is the latest in a series of posts based on the letters of the New York socialite, Julia Gardiner Gayley (1864-1937), to her eldest daughter, Mary Gayley Senni (1884-1971), a countess who lived on the outskirts of Rome. In 2010, the author purchased a trove of the letters in a Roman flea market. This mother-daughter correspondence spanned the years 1902-1936 and provides an intimate and unfiltered view of life in New York during the early twentieth century. You can find the earlier posts on our homepage.

On April 27, 1921, Julia Gardiner Gayley composed a letter to her daughter. With a mixture of excitement and astonishment, and while the details were still fresh in her mind, she described her evening at the Fabbri mansion the night before — from the moment she was “taken in to dinner” on the arm of the former ambassador to Germany to the after-dinner entertainment presented in the library of the Fabbris’ lavish renaissance-inspired palazzo at 7 East 95th Street.[1] By 3:30 in the afternoon Julie’s letter was postmarked and on its way to Italy.

This is the latest in a series of posts based on the letters of the New York socialite, Julia Gardiner Gayley (1864-1937), to her eldest daughter, Mary Gayley Senni (1884-1971), a countess who lived on the outskirts of Rome. In 2010, the author purchased a trove of the letters in a Roman flea market. This mother-daughter correspondence spanned the years 1902-1936 and provides an intimate and unfiltered view of life in New York during the early twentieth century. You can find the earlier posts on our homepage.

​​This is the first in a series of posts based on the letters of the New York socialite, Julia Gardiner Gayley (1864-1937), to her eldest daughter, Mary Gayley Senni (1884-1971), a countess who lived on the outskirts of Rome. In 2010, the author purchased a trove of the letters in a Roman flea market. This mother-daughter correspondence spanned the years 1902-1936 and provides an intimate and unfiltered view of life in New York during the early twentieth century.​Julie lived at Washington Square North and interacted with many luminaries and celebrated New Yorkers of her era. Her frequent and casual references to people places and events invited further research, often producing surprising results. In this piece, Julie visits her friend and neighbor Rita de Acosta Lydig (1875-1929), a renowned beauty with an exuberant sense of style, acclaimed for her intellect and her contribution to social causes, including women’s suffrage, the war effort and campaigns against narcotics.[1] Rita is hosting a party in honor of her friend, the legendary French actress, Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), ​who is on tour in America.

Before there was Imelda Marcos, there was Rita de Acosta Lydig, and before there was Bette Midler, there was Sarah Bernhardt. Rita and Sarah: the shoe queen and the divine one. I knew little about these two flamboyant icons of style and stage, just that Rita’s fabulous shoes are gems of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute and that the Divine Sarah was a French international superstar. That was all—until I discovered the 34-year correspondence of Julie to her daughter Mary. A cryptic remark in one of Julie’s letters revealed that Rita, Sarah and she were together at Rita’s house at Washington Square North on December 19, 1916.

The New Deal of the 1930s utterly transformed New York City, but most people hardly notice today. The landscape of public works created under the aegis of the Roosevelt Administration has become part of the backdrop of everyday life. But try to imagine the city without the Triborough Bridge, Lincoln Tunnel, and Henry Hudson Parkway and you get an idea of how much the city still owes to the New Deal. And there is so much more than those structures.

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City’s Upper Class and the Making of a MetropolisBy Clifton Hood​Columbia University Press, 512 pages

Reviewed by Maureen MontgomeryThis is an interesting time to be reviewing a history of New York’s upper class, especially one that discusses its members’ involvement in politics and the development of the city’s infrastructure, as well as their sense of civic responsibility and their self-fashioning as privileged. Privilege, rather than power, is the focus of Clifton Hood’s book and the form of privilege Hood focuses on is expressed in various exclusive practices and pursuits, and in the exercise of influence over local and national government for the advancement and protection of upper-class economic interests. ​